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This was the year social networks became normal. Next time you're in a crowded restaurant, close your eyes and listen to the chatter around you. Count how many times you hear the word "Facebook" in an hour. This year, the number of people on Facebook reached 800 million. Remember when it was for college students only?

Google+ also launched this year. It's not just a new social network; it's what Google+ chief Vic Gundotra called "the + part" of the new Google. Every part of the Google experience, especially search, involves social connections now. And Twitter was no also-ran in 2011. It became a system-level part of every iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch on Apple's new iOS 5. In the ongoing war of the social networks, this year's pivotal battles were over three key territories: identity, location and sharing. How did it play out?

Buffer just launched a new Buffer Button that any blog or content site should know about. Buffer is a simple service that lets users save up links in a stack. When a Buffer user sees a story he or she wants to share to Twitter or Facebook, he or she puts it into Buffer with a click. Buffer then automatically sends out the link from the user's social accounts at the best times for audience engagement.

It's a step beyond manual scheduling, like in HootSuite or TweetDeck. Buffer times the posts to go out at the right times and frequencies to get maximum clickage. Buffer studied its users' tweets and found that it increased clicks on links by 200%. Now publishers can put the Buffer Button on their content and make it easier to share.

Okay, time to get shopping today, at least according to all the merchants who have had their doors open since last night. But how about putting some of the retail therapy to better use? Apica, the cloud performance measurement vendor, is sponsoring a contest, and the first prize is a $1000 Amazon gift card. Certainly, we all spend too much with Amazon as it is, but this could go towards a new Kindle or a bunch of videos to bulk up your holiday collection.

With hundreds of add-on tools, Twitter certainly has plenty of ways you can analyze its data. I set out to find the best tools that I would recommend for you to track and compare your own Tweets, as well as examine the growth of followers and when you actually send out your 140-character missives. My two faves are TweetStats and Twittercounter. As you are resting from your Thanksgiving feast, you might want to try them out, along with several others that I will show you.

There are other tools that involve "sentiment analysis," being able to examine what people are Tweeting about or the attitude they are expressing in their tweets. The tools in this article are mainly for more quantifiable metrics. We look at whether you need to pre-authorize the tool to access your Twitter account, how much customization is available on the reports displayed, if there is a fee to use the service and whether you will need something outside of your browser to do the analysis. Most of these are completely free, which is nice since you can experiment and see what makes the most sense for you.

This week we all were horrified at seeing John Pike, a University of California at Davis police lieutenant, pepper spray a collection of kneeling student demonstrators. Within hours, it became a meme, complete with amusing images, references to the actual product used by Pike, and clever plays on the cop's name. While I won't link to any of the images in this post, what I will do is provide the complete reference for building your own meme in the future, and examine the various skills and services that you need to get it going. Granted, the pepper spray meme was built on the keyboards of many individuals, acting loosely together. But studying this meme's progress can teach you what you need to know to get your next one out in front and at the top of Google's organic searches.

MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson used to be known as "MySpace Tom," because newly created Myspace accounts automatically included him as a default friend. Nowadays, he may as well be known as "Klout Tom," because of his usage of and influence on the leading social networks of this era: Facebook, Google+ and Twitter.

Klout is a tool that measures your influence online. It puts a number on your ability to influence other people using social media. Tom's Klout score is 77, which is relatively high. If your work in any way involves social media, it's good to be influential in whatever your niche is. But is Klout really a meaningful way to track your influence? Should you be using it to help you in your career or life?

Ever since the eruption of the series of political uprisings now known as the Arab Spring, there's been much speculation over the role of social media and mobile technology. Whether revolutions in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and elsewhere could have happened without Twitter and cell phones is something historians will probably continue to debate years from now.

What's indisputably clear is that regardless of what's sparking and fueling these revolutions, technology is certainly helping to spread information and facilitate communication among the protesters.

PostPost, a powerful, noise-reducing search tool for Twitter, has pushed out some updates that make it even more useful. When we first covered PostPost in April, we were struck by how easy it made sifting through one's Twitter timeline. To do that, it indexes your last 3,200 tweets and then narrows your stream down to the most important 200 users and indexes the last 800 tweets posted by each of them.

Since then, PostPost has been updated to handle searches far more effectively. First, it switched its default search operator from OR to AND, which improves the results for queries containing multiple words. It also now uses a link: operator to let you search for links to specific sites or pages. Searches for multimedia content now return more specific results as well. Instead of searching broadly for videos or photos, you can drill down to just YouTube or just Instagram.

Folio Magazine, the trade journal of print magazine editorial and publishing managers, put out an interesting list of the pubs with the greatest number of Twitter followers, and how their follower lists have changed since the beginning of the year. Not surprisingly Time and People lead the list, both with more than two million followers apiece. The top 11 magazines all have more than one million followers. Eight magazines posted growth of more than 100 percent since January, with Seventeen leading the way, close to 150 percent growth at 282,000 followers.

In a survey released today, recruiting software platform Jobvite noted that more than 22 million Americans used social networks to find jobs in 2011. One in six people, more than 15%, say they found a job through social networking. Fifty-four percent of job seekers are using Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter for their search. Even though there's a higher job seeking volume on Facebook, more than one-third don't use it to look for work. There's far more actual job hunting on Twitter and Linked; almost all job seekers use LinkedIn for job hunting versus nearly 75 percent on Twitter. Overall, 86 percent (nine out of 10) job seekers have a profile on social media. Eighty-four percent of job seekers have a Facebook profile, 39 percent are onTwitter and 35 percent use LinkedIn.